Craig Federighi, The New Leader Of iOS And OSX, Was The Biggest Star At Apple's Event

At Apple's WWDC keynote, a new star emerged from the executive
ranks: Craig Federighi, the man
who runs iOS and OSX.

Whether he was explaining
technical details about Apple's new Mac operating system, or just
laying out the basic details, he was excellent.

Compared to Apple's other
executives, he was the funniest, and most natural seeming person
on stage.

Federighi got a bigger role at
Apple when Scott Forstall was forced out last
October. Jony Ive
leads the design of Apple's software, while Federighi leads the
implementation of that design on OSX and iOS.

Federighi was with Steve Jobs
at NeXT. He came to Apple when it bought NeXT. He left Apple to
be CTO of Ariba, a company that was later acquired by SAP. He
left before the acquisition, rejoining Apple in 2009 to lead Mac
software engineering.

Will Shipley, who once worked
under Federighi at NeXT
described him by saying, "He’s like seven feet tall and
gameshow-host handsome and he’s smiling like a used car
salesman."

He
also said, "Craig likes to get things
right. Sure, he’s damn charming, but he’s not
really concerned about politics, he’s concerned with making sure
we the needed things are done well."

We expect to see a lot more of
Federighi at future events. He seemed to be able to ad-lib, make
jokes, but stay focused on the task of talking about Apple's new
products and features.